Facebook Makes It Easy To Publish Instant Articles From Any CMS

Facebook‘s Instant Articles are a great way for users to explore content, and of course for publishers to get their content to the people it matters to most. Now, Facebook has made it possible for Instant Articles to be published directly from within the CMS that each publisher prefers.

Instant Articles make great content look even better. You get tilt-to-pan photos, auto-play video, interactive maps as well as embedded audio options. They don’t slow down a user’s Facebook experience and load very fast! So, it’s only natural that publishers want to use them.

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So, Facebook is now giving publishers the opportunity to use Instant Articles with “their existing Content Management Systems (CMS)”. Facebook said in its announcement of the feature

There are no new tools to learn, and publishers can easily publish their full catalog of articles each day. We heard clearly from publishers that they want a single tool to publish articles to the web, mobile apps, or any other places readers see their content. That’s why Instant Articles supports publishing directly from a publisher’s Content Management System — there’s no need to author articles in a new location.

Most Content Management Systems (CMS) support RSS, which is the basis of any publisher starting to use Instant Articles. A publisher will have to provide an RSS feed of content to Facebook so that it can automatically load new content in real-time. Instant Articles are created with HTML5, which means that publishers can “reuse code from their websites” and the integration process is extremely easy, but it also

…provides an expressive format for specifying all the necessary information to lay out an Instant Article, and it allows publishers to reuse the code from their websites. This format also provides support for third-party content, including social media embeds, ads, and analytics — all of which can be embedded in Instant Articles just like they are on the web.

Although Instant Articles are not available to all publishers at the moment, if your time does come to try them out, you can find all the relevant information on Facebook’s Documentation of the feature. In the next few months, more publishers will be joining up and Instant Articles will be seen by more mobile Facebook users.